Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Greg KH
2005-12-03T23:30:05Z

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 11:51:05PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 12:19:45PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 03:29:54PM +0100, Jesper Juhl wrote:
> > >
> > > Why can't this be done by distributors/vendors?
> >
> > It already is done by these people, look at the "enterprise" Linux
> > distributions and their 5 years of maintance (or whatever the number
> > is.)
> >
> > If people/customers want stability, they already have this option.
>
> I don't get the point where the advantage is when every distribution
> creates it's own stable branches.

They only do so because they are on different release cycles.

> AFAIR one of the reasons for the current 2.6 development model was to
> reduce the amount of feature patches distributions ship by offering an
> ftp.kernel.org kernel that gets new features early.

Sure, that's one of the reasons. But not the only one by far (I have a
whole list somewhere, I'm sure it's in the archives...)

> What's wrong with offering an unified branch with few regressions for
> both users and distributions? It's not that every distribution will use
> it, but as soon as one or two distributions are using it the amount of
> extra work for maintaining the branch should become pretty low.

"pretty low"? hahahahaha. As Arjan has said, the time and energy to do
this for a long period of time is huge. If I were you, I would listen
to the people who have and do maintain these kinds of kernels, it's not
a simple job by any means.

But by all means, if you want to try to do this, please do. I wish you
good luck.

thanks,

greg k-h